I've been reading multiple sources lately telling me all the great benefits of taking time every day to journal. I really hate journaling. My pen doesn't keep up with my thoughts. It forces me to slow down too much. This is probably the EXACT reason why people benefit from it, but I don't enjoy any aspect of it. I don't go back and read the few entries I've made and kept, nor can I usually read the handwriting. I'd rather type so that I can change a thought mid-sentence, but I can see how it would benefit lots of other people. What are your thoughts? Am I missing out on an important piece?

I've been reading the book "Where Prayer Becomes Real" recently. It brings up some excellent points I thought I'd share this week. Who do you pray to? How do you pray? Often time we expect God to only accept prayer from us after we've "figured it out". We try to fix ourselves before we pray. This isn't how it should be and this definitely isn't how God intended prayer to work. No where in the Bible is it suggested that we get rid of our anger first, or clear up the depression, or take care of our woes. No, we should approach God with our honesty. Prayer is a time to get honest, not to get it right. Like a close friend or a spouse, we can only expect to get closer to God by being more real with Him and spending more time with Him. If you only spent one hour per week with your spouse, how would that go? If you only spoke to your spouse when you needed something urgent, what would that be like? Your conversation with God should be presented in a similar way! What part of prayer have you struggled with?

This might be the easiest of the four topics this week for me to cover, unfortunately. That's because I'm definitely in the middle of it right now. I'd appreciate any words of advice! Twelve months ago (holy smokes, it's been a year already!) my wife and I moved from Kodiak, Alaska, to East Tennessee. We quit our jobs, sold our house and vehicles, and put only 30 boxes on a moving plane. We took 30 days to make and enjoy the drive down. Two years ago, my wife and I started planning for this transition. We started looking for places to live and jobs to work. I took a sales position that allowed me to work from anywhere, with plans to adjust based on where we landed. We knew it was going to be East Tennessee, but we didn't know what town yet. Before we knew it, we'd dropped everything in Alaska, bought a sketchy van and put 10k miles on it, and ended the trip at an Airbnb in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. We planned for a long time leading up to this move. One can't easily do it without massive scheduling! Closing on the house, transferring titles, packing boxes and taking them to the airline, buying a vehicle and getting it ready, checking our passports, planning a route... It felt overwhelming despite the amount of time we gave ourselves. Did I mention we had 3 groups of visitors in the last 8 weeks we lived there? Despite the organized chaos of moving, it seemed well orchestrated looking back. We didn't have to lower the price on our house or really anything we sold. All of our tickets off the island went smoothly. We had to put our van on the ferry from Kodiak to Homer as the first leg of the journey! We only broke down once on the trip, and considering the shape of the van, that was saying something! We found a lovely little town that we enjoyed everything about, and we quickly got plugged into a church family. We even found a piece of land in East Tennessee to call our own, despite our high ask of property bordering the national forest and near the Appalachian Trail.

I am a Christian man. I've started to avoid that term, as many (especially in the US) use the term lightly to mean they were baptized as a baby, or their family identified as Christian once upon a time, or they were born in Texas. I believe that Jesus died for our sins so that we'd have the option for salvation. I believe the Bible is inerrant. I try to do my best to represent these ideas in my daily life. I didn't grow up this way, in college I read the book "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins. It's a challenging book; it basically stated that your religion is chosen for you based on where you were born (think Indian is largely Hindu, China is largely Buddhist, and the Middle East is largely Muslim). I dove headfirst into this topic and while the argument is solid, it's not airtight. It was the catalyst to my hobby in apologetics. I'm now pursuing a master's in theology. While I am passionate about this topic, it is not my primary goal of this business to shove my ideas into your head. I intend to keep the spiritual topics *somewhat* neutral while having Christian implications. I'm not going to be another so called spiritual guru attempting to teach you to manifest your way to heaven. No, I believe there's but one truth and everything else is a cheap and unfulfilling imitation. If you'd like to know more about what I believe, I'd be happy to share. For the purpose of this business, spiritual resilience is still a heavily studied topic in the scientific world and evidence suggests that our brains thrive when seeking a higher power and purpose in life. I do feel that this course was the most watered down of the 4, but I think that's just me avoiding many of the Christian terms I wanted to incorporate. I hope you find this useful!

You don't need to have a "this is my hill and I'm going to die on it!" mentality with every single possible topic in your life. There are enough parties trying to pull you in different directions on so many levels that it's overwhelming to start trying. Democrats vs Republicans, sports teams, business drama, and trouble with the schools. And guess what? That's okay! You don't need to follow every topic and every person to decide if you need to adjust your entire belief system again for the third time this month. Start with YOU! What is important to you? and your family? Are you taken care of? Physically, financially, and spiritually? Take care of your priorities first! These are constant, and your opinion on them shouldn't be changing on a regular basis. Get your health in check, and stay on track. Get your income and budget set, and don't deviate. Do you know where you're going after life on Earth ends? No? It might be a good time to consider such things. I'd consider that to be a rather important topic worth spending some time on. My family and I are homesteading, homeschooling, exercising every day, praying, and working hard, (but not too hard, ya know?). Is this the only solution? No, and frankly we've worked ridiculously hard to get to where we are now. We've had a narrow vision and we've tried to stay focused. We're not all the way there yet, but we're on the right track. There are other ways (your way) to accomplish your focus, and that's what you're after today. Where do you go after this? After you and your immediate loved ones are headed in the right direction what should you believe? Politics? yes, you should vote, but I don't think you need to research every possible political topic and have a die-hard answer for it. You need to commit to what's important to you, and you probably don't have a lot of headspace left for other tasks. Neighborhoods, local governments, state taxes, federal laws, etc. are constantly changing. Can you keep up with all of them? Yes, but at what cost?